Initiatives

Overview

The financial crisis and its economic aftershocks have spawned the first serious examination of the structure of our current banking system and the public policies that have fueled consolidation over the last 30 years and untethered financial institutions from their communities.

Overview

Access to the Internet is an essential infrastructure for any community that cares about economic development, quality of life, and educational opportunities. Unfortunately, most communities are presently dependent on a few unaccountable absentee corporations that act as gatekeepers to...

Overview

Wind and sun are available everywhere, so renewable energy can be economically harnessed at small scales across the country. This nature of renewable energy, and the exponential increase of renewable energy generation, promises to decentralize the nation’s grid system. ...

Overview

Over the last 25 years, a handful of giant companies have grown to dominate the U.S. economy. ILSR challenges the wisdom of this market concentration. Through research and analysis, we have built a compelling case that places that are home to...

Overview

At the founding of the American Republic the word “private” had pejorative connotations. Derived from the Latin word “privare”, private meant to divide or tear apart. A privateer was a pirate. The word “public” was an honorable adjective, often...

Overview

ILSR's Waste to Wealth program helps communities across the country create policies and practices that address citizens' environmental concerns and economic needs. We help citizens fight the incinerators and landfills that pollute their air and water, and drive property...

The content that follows was originally published on the Institute for Local Self-Reliance website at http://ilsr.org/southern-california-edison-buys-250-mw-distributed-solar-pv-less-electricity-natural-gas/

Updated 3 PM: Preliminary numbers had suggested that Southern California Edison’s distributed rooftop solar PV purchase would be among the most cost-effective solar projects in the world, and data released yesterday confirmed that:

Southern California Edison has selected 250 MW worth of solar bids from companies able to produce solar electricity for 20 years for less money annually than the 20 year levelized cost of energy of a combined-cycle natural gas turbine power plant.

SCE’s bidding process for smaller renewable projects is smart. These small projects do not face the multi-year bureaucratic delays for extensive reviews, like most utility-scale solar, so each small unit can be built as quickly as normal commercial rooftop solar projects. They are made up of multiple distributed solar installations of under 20 MW, which in combination total a power plant-sized 250 MW.

…The requirement is that the renewable energy has to be priced to cost no more than the Market Price Referent (MPR) – which is an annual calculation of the 20 year levelized cost of energy of a combined cycle gas turbine.

The MPR has recently been around 11 cents per kilowatt-hour, so the solar PV projects will produce electricity for less than the retail rate in southern California. There’s indication of enormous distributed PV demand, because SCE received bids for up to 2,500 MW of projects, but only accepted 250 MW.

About John Farrell

John Farrell directs the Energy Self-Reliant States and Communities program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and he focuses on energy policy developments that best expand the benefits of local ownership and dispersed generation of renewable energy. More